Saturday, November 19, 2005

If you don't like dirty nappies, look away now!

Warning: This post contains detailed "nappy content(s)" (sic).

A few weeks ago Hayley went to get her hair done and left Oliver with me for a few hours. In this time I was also expecting a TV engineer who was coming to upgrade our satellite TV and also another delivery. Hayley left the two of us a picture of calm. Within two hours everyting had gone to rats! Oliver, perhaps objecting to these intruders into our home, cried for virtually the whole morning: an unprecendented act on his part.

Today Hayley went to a sale of baby clothes with her friend Dawn. During this time Oliver was perfectly happy, right up to the point where he needed a nappy change. He started to cry and so I picked him up to take him upstairs and change him. I realised that holding him under his bottom may squeeze out the offending substance, so I popped him onto my shoulder and simply suported his feet.

Then, as I walked up the stairs, I felt that his feet were wet. I looked down to see my hand covered in poo. I diverted to the bathroom where I washed my hand (still with Oliver on my shoulder) and headed off to the nursery. On arriving in the nursery I put him on his changing table and looked down at my trousers. There were three large orangey brown, runny patches of poo on them. By this point I realised I was in trouble (though for some reason I was still laughing). Clearly he was going to need a complete change of clothes. And as there was another patch of brown on my shirt, so was I!

I removed his trouswers which turned out to have a substamntial amount of excrement in them. But there was worse to come. It had leaked out onto all his clothes and what was leaking out smelled truly appalling. Involuntarily I wretched at the smell: something that has never happened to me before. I even remember in the first few days thinking how sweet and yeasty his poo smelled: a bit like warm bread! But now I badly wanted to open the window. However, it was a few degrees above freezing outside and I didn't want him to get cold.

Forgive me but I am going to have to describe the poo. You may want to skip to the next paragraph. It was a mixture of regular runny orangey brown poo with some awful greyish sticky gooey poo mixed in. The smell was terrible and if I could have left him safely on the changing table to go 15 feet to the cupbaord where I have nose clips for swimming, I would have done so and put one on.

I persevered and eventually got him cleaned up thanks to a large number of wet wipes, then stripped off myself and collected up our collective soiled clothes. Throughout the whole of course proceedings Oliver was quiet and happy, even when I had to clean his bare back with cold wet-wipes.

When Hayley arrived home fifteen minutes later I recounted the tale. She rocked with laughter, doubling up on the sofa, almost crying. She then took great pleasure in ringing Dawn and relaying the story to her!

Now, I know that he is not waiting for his Mum to go out before doing this sort of thing, so I am left with the unavoidable truth: that this is the sort of horror that Hayley has to deal with on a regular basis!

There have been times when giving up work and looking after Oliver has seemed attractive to me. Today was not one of them.

1 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hmmmm.... I seem to remember a certain post made on September 10th saying that you loved changing his nappy, and that you had waited to do it your entire life. Anyway, this incident sounds similar to when my dad and his friends decided that it would be funny to feed me Stilton cheese. I loved it, but the next person to change my nappy didn't!

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